


A Kiss in the Dark is Worth Two in The 80s

by Jillypups



Series: Kissing Starks [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: 80s AU, Brandon is a total douche, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff, Stirrup pants baby, Walkmaaaaan, We got the beat!, but I did a thing, here i go again, my writing is so meh now, this hit me out of nowhere yesterday, this is so dumb and i am so sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-25 07:31:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12526188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jillypups/pseuds/Jillypups
Summary: Ned and Cat meet on the quad of Boston University. Set in the KTG universe in 1984. If you've read KTG, this is what Ned was reminiscing about in his POV in chapter 22.I hope y'all like it! My writing still feels really off to me. Sorry!!Picset





	A Kiss in the Dark is Worth Two in The 80s

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bex_xo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bex_xo/gifts), [SassyEggs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SassyEggs/gifts), [sarahcakes613](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarahcakes613/gifts), [vanillacoconuts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanillacoconuts/gifts).



The wind is a good strong whip this afternoon. it feels about as cold and grey as the sky above does, and it gusts up whirlwinds of dead leaves, flurries of brown and orange and red, the occasional yellow the only cheery color out here on the quad of Boston University. Well, the only cheery color that nature has been providing for these past few weeks of late autumn. Elsewhere there are splashes of jewel tones in women’s scarves and sweaters, bright red BU sweatshirts worn by the jocks like Ned’s brother Brandon, who is striding beside him with the long-legged swagger of a star quarterback.

Talking like one, too. It’s language and attitude so foreign to Ned that he wonders how he can understand him at all.

“So anyways, I told Barbrey I’d call her later, but then legit five _minutes_ after she left, that totally bangin’ babe, what’s her name, you know, the valley girl with tits so big you wanna blow on ‘em like balloons. What’s her name again?”

“Ashara,” Ned says with something of a sigh. “Ashara Dayne.”

Brandon grins and snaps his fingers. “ _That’s_ the babe. Yeah, so I wound up bagging her the whole day. I mean, my room still smelled like perfume and sex, but man, she was all over me. It was _totally_ wizard.”

Now Ned sighs in earnest. Christ, how he pined over that girl the first three years of college. Okay, first three and a quarter. And ten days. Aaaand about thirty seconds. Dammit, he thinks, tuning out all the salacious details of what his brother was doing to his long time crush not even two hours ago. I was working up the courage to hit on her. Probably by Christmas, I could’ve. Definitely by graduation in May, he thinks. Or by the time he got his first paying job. But now there’s no way. A girl who’s into his brother? No freakin’ way at _all._

“Oh, shit,” Brandon groans suddenly, the dirty bird playboy quality of his voice sharpening to something like dread as he cuts himself off and stops walking in order to abruptly turn around and face the other way, standing stock still in the middle of the dead grass.

Startled, Ned blinks and looks at his brother. “What’s your damage?”

Brandon rolls his eyes, grey like Ned’s though that’s about all they have in common, down to their contrasting majors of Brandon’s communications and Ned’s land management. “That girl over there, the nerd in the glasses. I stood her up a few weeks ago when I found out she wouldn’t put out on the first date. Apparently she’s a feminist but not _that_ kind of feminist, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t,” Ned says, squinting from the sting of the wind and from trying to discern which nerd he’s talking about, but then a girl walks across the quad perpendicularly from them, her hips the subtlest of sways in her oversized sweater that says LOVE, and she is arms full of books, is hair all afloat from the wind, though her Walkman headphones do some small thing to keep it out of her eyes. She’s _pretty._ “What girl are you even talking about?” he asks, not really caring now that he’s got something more interesting in his sights, but then she trips, and suddenly he _really_ doesn’t care about some failed conquest of Brandon’s, and before he can stop himself he takes a step towards her.

“The one in the _glasses,_ doofus. She’s got auburn hair and- and oh shit, you gotta be kidding me,” Brandon says with a glance over his shoulder and a sudden albeit poorly concealed shout of laughter. “She’s the one who just dropped her books. Hey, where are you going?” he asks, because after that first step Ned took another, then another, and now he’s walking towards her in earnest.

“To help her,” Ned calls over his shoulder.

“Whatever, you’re wasting your time. Later, hoser!” Brandon shouts. “Stay gay!”

 

 

One second Cat is walking across the quad to show Brandon Stark what he’s missing, all breezy and casual and totally choice in her new sweater and stirrup pants, and the next thing she knows she nearly falls on face after slipping on someone’s dropped and forgotten Prince cassette tape and dumping her books as she stumbles forward to catch her balance.

Great. Just totally wonderful. The fact that “Head Over Heels” by The Go-Go’s is blasting in her ears is more than a little mocking right now, and she grumpily yanks her headphones down around the back of her neck and shoves her hand up under her oversized sweater to push stop on the Walkman clipped to her waistband. She crouches down, careful to keep her knees out of the grass as she gathers up her books. At least the notes she had tucked in her History of the Ming Dynasty book didn’t go flying everywhere. In this wind, she’d never have been able to catch them all.

“Hey,” someone says from above and behind her. “You all right?”

Cheeks burning from embarrassment, Cat pushes her glasses up her nose and sighs, counts to three for dignity and courage, and then turns around still in her crouch to look up at him, and he’s cute in a serious guy librarian sort of way in his big wool trench coat and thick black scarf, a Jansport backpack slung over one shoulder. But he’s got kind eyes, and kind is exactly what she needs right now; Brandon didn’t exactly bother covering up his delight when she nearly biffed it just now.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” she says, giving him a weak, still-sorta-mortified smile before turning back to pick up the books within arm’s reach.

“Here, let me help you,” he says, squatting down beside her, close enough that their knees knock and he almost sends her falling back on her butt before he reaches out and braces an arm against the middle of her back, and the gesture brings her in close to the trunk of him like it’s some sort of squatting side-hug. “Crap, I’m sorry. That’s not being much of a help.”

“No, it’s fine. It’s the thought that counts, right?” she says, not necessarily _shy_ to essentially be in an embrace with this guy right off the bat. No, not shyness, not exactly. More like surprise at how he feels sort of kind of like home, at how her hands tremble slightly and her heart beats like she just ran here.

Cat clears her throat and smiles at him, a little warmer than the first smile, and she pushes herself gently out of his arms – well, his arm – and stacks another book on the small pile she’s already accumulated. Brandon Stark is nowhere in her thoughts now, not with this polite guy here on his hands and knees, reaching for her composition book and a battered copy of Whitman’s _Leaves of Grass._  

“You sure do have an armload of books,” he says conversationally, and it’s nothing scintillating, just an observation spoken aloud, but it still makes Cat’s smile broaden, and she ducks her head to let her hair hide it as she grabs the last book. “Here, let me,” he says when she goes to haul the decent-sized stack of books up into her arms. “No offense, but you didn’t have the best of luck the first go round.”

Cat gives him a mock glare and a scoff to match, and her heart does a little pitter-patter dance when the seriousness of his gaze fades and turns into something more mirthful, and the sky-grey of his eyes damn near twinkles as he grins at her. It makes him look like a little boy in that moment, and suddenly she can’t help but laugh.

“Fine,” she says with a sniff and the lifting of her chin that she hopes makes her look regal, here where she’s practically on her knees in the grass in the middle of an ugly day that’s starting to look a lot prettier. “For back talk like that, you can carry then all the way back to my apartment. But first you need to tell me your name, pal.”

“Ned,” he says after a moment’s hesitation. “Ned Stark. I uh, I think you know my brother.”

Cat blinks. How can _this_ guy be related to _that_ waste of space? This guy is bangin’, whereas Brandon is just a walking, talking, grody venereal disease. Her expression clearly must have given her thoughts away, because Ned – Ned Stark – winces and nods as they both stand up together, Cat in her totally cool new sweater and Ned with all of her books in his arms like they don’t way much more than Lysa’s old Trapper Keeper.

“Yeah, I know, he can be something of a—”

“Total wastoid?” she says dryly.

Ned laughs then, and even though he shakes his head, he agrees with her. “Pretty much, yeah. So, Cat, where are we headed to?” he says, glancing around the quad as if an apartment building will spring up out of the dry blond grass, and he’s all guileless and good, earnest and open when he looks back at her with a light, sincere smile.

She narrows her eyes at him. “How did you know my name?”

“Well,” Ned says after a few beats, clearly proud of himself. “I make it a habit to know the names of all the beautiful girls on campus.”

That little pitter-patter dance of her heart? It’s a veritable square dance now. “Oh, really, and how many names do you know?” she asks as she hugs herself against the wind, walking towards her nearby neighborhood, Ned a dutiful companion by her side as he slows his pace to match hers.

“Only Cat.”

 

Her apartment barely qualifies to be called anything more than a breadbox, it’s that small, but it’s nice enough. Clean and bright and yet cozy, with quilts on the back of her little loveseat couch and, he notes when he glances through the ajar bedroom door, on her bed as well. There are mounted posters of Cyndi Lauper and Duran Duran on the walls with ticket stubs framed next to them, and her tidy fastidiousness makes him smile; he certainly doesn’t think she’s a nerd but he can see why Brandon would. But no, Ned likes it. It reminds him of himself and how careful he’s always been with his belongings. His father never stepped on any of _his_ G.I. Joes, that’s for sure.

“Here, let me take those books for you,” she says after closing the door against the chill and the gust and the waning afternoon.

“No, it’s okay, I can, uh,” he says, stopping halfway when he realizes he’s got nothing, here.

Cat laughs. “What, you’re just going to stand around in my front room all day holding them? Your arms are going to fall off,” she says, and then she gets a little mischievous look on her face. “And _then_ who would keep me from falling over?”

There’s the awkward exchange of her textbooks, Ned bending his legs a little to get closer to her height as she scoops them up and away from him, her arm a slide and slip between them and his chest, and while he’s never been a poetic man, there’s something of a tingling trail that remains even after she takes the books away from him, like a little path of Catelyn marking him.

“I’ll be right back,” she says, and when he frowns in confusion – where is she gonna take them, outside? – she tips her head towards her bedroom. “My desk’s in there.”

“Ah,” Ned says with a nod. The bedroom. And now he’s imagining her reading in bed late at night, or maybe early on Sunday morning, glasses sliding down her nose. It’s as cozy and quaint an image as is this little apartment of hers.

He uses his brief moment of solitude to give the place a closer look; there are the posters and ticket stubs but a print or two as well, Monet’s pond thing and Van Gogh’s starry night sky one that his mother always loved. And then in the kitchen, a surprise.

“Who’s this?” he asks when his eyes fall on a goldfish in a tank on her kitchen counter, and it drifts and flutters and wiggles to the surface only to sink back down and do it again.

“Who’s what?” she asks as she emerges from the bedroom, pushing her glasses up her nose as she looks at him. He notices that the frames are blue, here where the indoor lights set them to glow more than the sooty sky.

When he points and she looks, she makes a little groan and tilts her head back to stare at the ceiling. Long neck, the delicate soft color of milk, not that anyone here in Boston has much luck with tans this time of year. The wind-tangled drape of her hair over one shoulder. Her Walkman headphones still hanging around her neck, the cord of which goes down and then inside her sweater, and now he’s wondering what’s going on under there. Undershirt or bra, the cinch of a waist as pale as her throat, the swell and the rise of her—

Ned clears his throat hastily and shoves his hands in his jacket pockets. Goldfish, he thinks to himself sternly. Goldfish. Goldfish. Boobs. No, goldfish!

“Okay, it’s a dumb name, but in my defense, my little sister Lysa came up with it when she was still in middle school.”

Ned smiles. “Hey, I’ve got a little brother, too. Go on, try me.”

Cat sighs, and it’s a pretty sound from a pretty girl, and he has to admit it, here, he wouldn’t mind making her sigh in an altogether other way. Wouldn’t mind one bit. She wrinkles her nose and rolls her eyes, toys a bit with her Walkman cord, bites her lip a moment before surrendering.

“Catfish.”

Ned laughs outright, unable to help himself. Not with what’s actually a pretty cute name, not with her expression of mortified exasperation which is actually pretty cute, too.

“I like it.”

“I like it when you laugh,” she says in a semi-blurt, but when he raises his eyebrows in surprise, the gesture somehow gives her confidence, because then she nods and smiles. “Yeah, I do. You don’t strike me as a guy who laughs all the time.”

Smart, pretty _and_ intuitive. My brother is a moron, Ned thinks as he returns her smile. “Well, so what if I am? Or don’t, or whatever. Laugh, I mean.”

Now she grins. “Because,” she says as she gently brushes past him into her little kitchen, glancing over her shoulder as she does so. “It means each laugh is that much more precious, and I’ve already made you laugh twice now.”

He smiles back at her, wondering if his face is going to hurt after today. He’s not that much of a smiler, either, though he still considers himself to have a pretty decent sense of humor.

“Yes, you have,” he says.

She turns to face him, a look of contemplation on her face, and there goes that lip thing again, where she’s biting it and he’s wondering how soft a mouth it could be, if it tastes like cherry lip gloss. And that’s when he realizes he’s already got a thing for this girl, Brandon be damned, and that’s when he realizes he better speak up now and not wait another three and half years just for some other, some other _douchebag_ to swoop in. But right now the only thing running through his head is Goldfish-Catfish-Catboobs-Goddammit Ned-Say-Something, and clearing his throat again doesn’t do a damn thing, but then to his overwhelming relief, Cat opens her mouth.

“Look, I know it’s not even five o’clock, but it’s Friday night, and I was wondering if you’d like a glass of wine?”

Relief. The hammering of his heart slows somewhat, though not quite all the way, and he nods emphatically, taking his hands out of his pockets in order to remove his coat.

“Yeah, I’d like that. Well, actually, I’d love it.”

She beams at him, this girl in the glasses, this girl with the poetry and the fish and the quilts, and Ned finds he cannot help but smile back, and he’s still smiling even when she opens the Frigidaire door but then hesitates and gives him a funny look.

“It’s pink, sorry.”

His smile stretches into a rare grin.

“It’ll be perfect.”

 

“What do you mean, you don’t watch _The A-Team_? _Everyone_ watches _The A-Team_ ,” Ned says incredulously from the seat next to her on her loveseat.

They’re sitting side by side but angled, with each of their backs wedged more into the opposite corners of the small couch, their knees touching, and Cat’s got one foot propped up on the cushion with her chin on her knee, while Ned does that guy thing of stretching his arm along the back of the sofa, his fingers close enough to tug on her hair.

Cat shrugs.

“I’m saying I just don’t, that’s all. I like _Cagney and Lacey_ , though. Do you watch that?”

“What, the lady cops?” he asks, taking a swallow of white zinfandel before leaning over to set his glass on the coffee table.

“Detectives, and you better not say you don’t watch _just_ because they’re two women in the leading roles,” Cat says, wagging a finger at him as she sips her wine. “Ugh, gag me! It’s 1984, you spazz, not 19 _54._ ”

He chuckles, holding up his hands in surrender. “Hey, now, I never said I _didn’t,_ I just asked for clarification.”

“Asking for clarification implies a lack of knowledge about the show, which _further_ indicates that you’ve never watched it!”

“What are you, a lawyer?”

Cat lifts her eyebrows. “Maybe I am.”

Another grin. “I’d believe it. You’re terrifying.”

She giggles like an idiot, school girl giddy and unable to help herself after wine, after an hour of conversation that has danced and flirted with dozens of topics before finally settling on favorite television shows. And while their answers might be different, the fact that neither of them do much TV watching makes her kind of giddy too. We have so much in common, she thinks with another sip.

The glasses of wine turn to two, and when the sun goes down they order Chinese takeout, Cat with her legs tucked beneath her and Ned with his feet on the coffee table, ankles crossed to avoid knocking over one of several half empty cartons of lo mein, beef and broccoli, and steamed vegetables. They watch television until _E.T._ comes on one of the few channels Cat gets on her rabbit-eared television, which will forever be her new favorite movie because ten minutes into it, Ned finally, _finally_ takes his damn arm off the back of the sofa and drapes it over her shoulders instead.

Fireworks in her head, though that might having something to do with the wine, and fireworks in her heart, and _those_ have everything to do with the warm weight of his arm around her, with the warm firmness of his side as she readjusts her legs to lean against him. My head is on his chest, kinda, she thinks, and he’s got his arm around me, he’s got his arm around me, he’s got his arm around me.

“Oh, I love this part,” she murmurs, sliding her hand across his middle to hold him right back, and because it’s so _emotional_ when E.T. comes back to life, she sniffles and takes off her glasses to wipe her eyes.

“You okay down there?” Ned asks, his body shifting a bit so he can crane his neck to gaze at her.

She nods and smiles up at him before settling back in to watch the rest of the movie, her glasses still in her hand. The movie’s a little fuzzier for it, but it’s a lot more comfortable here against his chest without them on.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” she says with a yawn. “I just really love this movie.”

She squirms once with another readjustment to get more comfortable here on this loveseat with him, with Ned Stark of the quiet smiles and the grey eyes, here with the warmth between them and the smell of Chinese food in the air, with the flicker of the television screen in her dark apartment that serves to make it feel like they’re the only two people in the world. Here. Together.

Her blinks get heavier, linger a little more each time until she realizes she’s missing entire lines of dialogue, and her breathing must have changed or her head must’ve gotten heavier on him, because he gives her shoulder a little squeeze.

“You falling asleep down there, Cat?” he whispers.

She shakes her head twice against him.

“Nope, not falling asleep,” she says.

And then she falls asleep.

Dark dreams of soaring through the night sky, sweet dreams of a man in an overcoat with a load of books together, whimsical disjointed dreams of red and orange leaves in the wind and Reese’s Pieces, and then unpleasant ones of nasty federal agents and dying aliens. Cat eventually pulls herself up and out of slumber, glasses still in the hand that’s on Ned’s stomach, opens her eyes to see the blurry credits scrolling up the black screen. Huh, she thinks as she lets her eyes close again. I guess I didn’t fall asleep for that long, and she’s about to apologize to Ned for falling asleep when his arm moves.

Carefully, lightly, he lifts a hand to brush her hair away from her face, and then she has the lighting-arc, fizzy-tingle sensation of Ned pressing his mouth to her forehead in a feather light kiss. He’s got stubble now, here at the very end of the evening, but it’s still soft, gentle, the sweetest kiss she’s ever gotten.

“This has been a pretty spectacular first date,” he murmurs against her forehead before resting his cheek against the crown of her head.

First date, first date, first date, she thinks, smiling so broadly in the dark that it makes her cheeks hurt.

“Yeah, it has,” she whispers back.

No reply.

“Ned?”

A soft snore.

Cat closes her eyes, still smiling, and gives the trunk of his body a gentle squeeze. “Just think of how good the second one’s gonna be.”


End file.
